ghosts
by Kuruk
Summary: He had laid siege to the world, purifying it with the white dragon's heavenly fire. Now all he feels is the cold, an absence of something he can't quite articulate.  — N, Touya.


_Notes: So I had this thought pop up in my head and I wrote it down and suddenly it mutated into this piece... it's odd, disjointed, and tragic, I think... but I'm still rather intrigued by it. Hope you enjoy it. _

_Characters: N, Touya._

_Universe: Post-B/W, sort of AU._

_Warnings: copious amounts of biological and psychological terminology (it's the way I imagine N to think), sort of disturbing._

_Disclaimer: I don't own _Pokémon_. All errors are my own._

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><p><em><strong>ghosts<strong>_

The guilt creeps up on late nights like this.

Usually, the coldness of the room saps his strength and pacifies his mind into despondence, his usually vicious thought processes whirring to a complete halt. It is the kind of cold that penetrates every layer of his being, and he wonders, sometimes, when he starts to (allows himself to) think again, if it's possible that he and this room are at absolute zero—absolutely no movement, no particle vibrations, no _anything, _subsequently leaving the average kinetic energy at zero. It's a theoretical value, he knows, but it must be impossible to be this _cold_.

When he starts to wonder, his neurons' electrochemical signals eventually start traveling down that same path, and no matter how many times he berates himself for succumbing to magical thinking, it still happens. The guilt is worse than the cold, he finds, because it exacerbates it. It haunts him for eternities (because once those neural pathways are triggered, they never stop firing), so long until he starts screaming in his mother tongue and they come in to force him down because they can't understand what he's saying, and isn't this why started the Crusades in the first place—to protect them from his own kind? And in that one moment between being held down and feeling the frigid sensation of liquid ice being injected into him and racing along his blood vessels, the guilt is gone and he feels completely _justified._

But then it becomes cold again and his neurons stop firing (can't reach threshold, it's all-or-none) and he breathes in and out and in and out and forgets what he was so angry about, that he was even angry at all.

— . . . —

In this place he's forgotten that time even exists.

There are no bars keeping him in, only padded white cushion-walls , and soon enough his eyes can see nothing but white, even when the people enter the room to feed him.

White, he thinks, is beautiful—a union of all wavelengths, a golden mean. He finds himself babbling this to the people when they visit, but they ignore him. He finds, however, that he can't care—impressions slide off his mind as if there were no adhesion between the two, and he forgets things very easily. He tries to diagnose himself sometimes, because he knows that the people are wrong. Schizophrenic, mad, manic-depressive, deranged, psychotic break, genius; none of those terms' denotations (or even connotations) apply, because he's never been one of them, and those human labels can't be used to diagnose him. He thinks he knows the name for what he feels in his own language, but when he tries to let it pass from his lips the memory slips away and his tongue feels too heavy (too human).

He cries, then, but moisture is not secreted from his tear ducts.

— . . . —

He thinks he likes it when the boy visits, but he's not sure why.

The boy is an absence of light in this white dimension, and while he would usually be distressed by this, he understands why._ Zekrom_, he thinks with numbed glee, but does not know what that name means.

His visitor sits on the padded floor, legs crossed and dark eyes hesitant, nervous, darting from white space to white space. After minutes of this, he can recognize a pattern in the boy's evasive eye movements, and while he registers a bit distantly that it's illogical for the boy to visit him in this place and then avoid eye contact or any type of communication, the fact that he has recognized a pattern sparks a life into him that he didn't remember he could experience. The numbers dart through his mind's eye (again) then, and he almost feels himself, unencumbered by the abstract languages his brain falls back on when his cognitive abilities are in a deficit.

"It's cold here," he says, trying to move his arms to produce friction and heat with his body, but finding that they are immobile. He frowns; odd.

The boy's eye movements come to a halt at the sound of his voice, and tries not to sigh. "You always say that," he replies, voice soft and muffled by the padded walls.

"Do I?" he asks, unable to recall another instance of this. His brow furrows in concentration in an effort to remember, but soon he forgets what he was trying to remember in the first place. "Do you find it cold in here?"

The boy shakes his head. "I've asked the staff… the temperature's always at 70 degrees—,"

"Fascinating; your body's exothermic reactions must be much more numerous than my own—,"

"No, N," the boy interrupts, voice firmer than before. "It's not cold in this place… it's all in your head."

_N_? The fourteenth letter of the alphabet, possibly a variable… representative of what, exactly? He doesn't understand.

"You're suggesting, then, that there is a malfunction with my hypothalamus and thermoregulatory homeostatic processes?"

The boy sighs this time. "No. The doctors have scanned your brain, and there's nothing wrong with you."

His frown deepens. "My discomfort is psychosomatic, then?" he concludes.

"Uh… that means in your head, right?" when he frowns in thought again, the boy amends his statement. "Just… yeah… psychosomatic, right."

A breakthrough, then—a break in the pattern of magical thinking, a stroke of insight, of brilliance.

"After being so close to a source of unfathomable heat and forming a symbiotic relationship with it, my body is now unaccustomed to normal temperatures. Without it—," he struggles for the name, the _name_—white and blue and _fire_, so much _fire_—, "Re… Resh…" his tongue trips over itself again.

"Reshiram," the boy fills in, and he nods vehemently in response, movements jerk-like and spastic.

"Y-yes… _Reshiram_," the word is full of power, he can feel it curling off his tongue, crackling through the air, as if it would incinerate this cage, this prison. "_Reshiram._" he repeats slowly, enunciating each syllable. "_Reshiram_…"

After a few moments of silent, the boy fidgets uncomfortably. "N," the boy calls, but he still doesn't comprehend. "Are you okay? I t-think it's happening again. S-should I… should I call the doctors?"

"You and I," he says excitedly, ignoring the boy's questions. "You and I, you and I… _Reshiram _and _Zekrom_," viridian green eyes fill to the brim with life, focusing on the boy, whose black tints look vibrant, even beautiful in this white prison. "We four are all variables in the equation—the arithmetic that defines our souls—no, the soul of the _universe_—,"

"N, stop!" the boy yells, "Shut up! Stop it! Snap out of it!"

But N can't. How can he, when he's found the answer again, after all this time, lost in the cold—

_The boy and the king. Black and White. Electricity and fire. Creation. Destruction. Union, no _Unova_—_

"I understand," N says, and the tears fall this time, pooling in the fabric of the straitjacket, "I understand, I understand, I understand—,"

The familiar feel of harsh hands holding him down and the feel of ice racing toward his brain and the last thing N remembers is the sight of Touya's face in the doorway, behind the nurses, and—

It all goes white.

— . . . —

The guilt creeps up on late nights like this, though he isn't sure how he knows how it's night right now, or what night even is.

Sometimes when he's in the deeper stages of rapid eye movement sleep, he dreams of fractured images—the white dragon, setting fire to the world and striking down those that would get in the way; his brethren, finally freed from their oppressors; the black dragon and the boy, face grim and afraid; fire and electricity clashing over the stormy seas of the Kanto region (the last region Team Plasma had left to liberate, the final obstacle he would have to confront to leave the world a better place for pokémon); falling, and the smell of electrons hanging in the air, occluding his senses and driving the white dragon to return to whence it came, to an orb—

But then he wakes up and the images cannot be consolidated into memory.

Though numbed by the cold, it is always the emotions that linger, that haunt him, that lead him to scream in a language that humans cannot understand. He screams for Reshiram, for Team Plasma and the dream he couldn't fulfill, and for the boy, the other hero, Touya, and the defeat he handed him.

But then there is the cold again, and the memories of the emotions the images forced from him are lost, and everything is lost, and everything becomes white again and so, so unbearably cold.

(Cannot reach threshold, cannot reach threshold.)

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><p><em>AN: Well... I'll be the first to say that it was a very odd piece. But let me clear up a couple of things for you:_

_1) I imagined this to occur in a sort-or-alternate-universe, in which Touya does not gain the ability to summon Zekrom until much later. Subsequently, N and Team Plasma have wreaked havoc and taken over other regions, at least until Touya was able to summon Zekrom and defeat N and Reshiram. Because of his failure, N suffered something of a psychotic break and was put into an asylum in lieu of prison for his sentence (since I imagine all the crimes Team Plasma was responsible for plus attempting to overthrow the Pokémon League would incur a heavy sentence)._

_2) The repetition of the _"cannot reach threshold" _line and the _"it's all-or-none" _line are references to how neurons work. Basically, there's a certain voltage that this certain part of a neuron must reach in order to fire off a signal. This voltage is known as threshold, and if threshold is not reached, then the signal doesn't fire, hence all-or-none event. Basically, N can't think..._

_3) I imagine N to be something of a genius who thinks mathematically, unlike most humans, who tend to think through language._

_4) I'm sleep-deprived and procrastinating some other obligations (physics), so this came out weird._

_Yeah... also, this is a response to a request on my formspring account: "_I request Black(Touya)xN from Pokemon. Anyway relationship: friendship, romantic, rivals. ::_." The person who requested this did so anonymously, but I hope that if you read this you're satisfied with what I did with your request. Thank you for the inspiration, and I'm sorry for the wait and if I didn't write what you were hoping for._

_Anyway... as always, thanks go out to the readers. Thank you to all those who took the time to read this piece! Reviews are always appreciated_

_Hope you enjoyed it._


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